Impacts of Lean Six Sigma over organizational sustainability: A survey study J  essica Galdino de Freitas * , Helder Gomes Costa, Fernando Toledo Ferraz Department of Production Engineering, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, RJ, Brazil article info Article history: Received 13 May 2016 Received in revised form 20 February 2017 Accepted 8 April 2017 Available online 12 April 2017 Handling Editor: Cecilia Maria Villas B^ oas de Almeida Keywords: Lean Six Sigma Lean Six Sigma Organizational sustainability Survey LinkedIn abstract The purpose of this paper was to verify how Lean Six Sigma (LSS) could influence the organizational sustainability through their projects, given that there are few scientific studies that seek to evaluate the relationship that current exist between this tree streams: Lean, Six Sigma and Sustainability. The metodologie used on this study has qualitative point of view, based on experts' perception and collected by survey. The authors structured a questionnaire with 13 impacts of LSS, which was subsequently applied over 106 international LSS experts, with Green Belt, Black Belt, Master Black Belt or Champions certification. The survey investigate the expert perception of LSS influence over the three pillars of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). There were identified in this study the correlation between LSS and organi- zational sustainability, principally due to impacts that significantly influence over Financial pillar of TBL. The authors also identified the 5 more influential impacts over organizational were identified and the importance of cost dimension for sustainability in organizations. This study assists in expansion of knowledge about the use of LSS by evaluating the influence of the metodologie over organizational sustainability and providing a deeper understanding of the relationship existing between them. Because of its feature, this study also raises the awareness among governments and companies regarding the weaknesses identified between TBL pillars. The survey application model through the LinkedIn platform presented in this study also shows itself as a possible source of inspiration for future studies. Even with the large volume of articles published about the Green Lean Six Sigma (GLSS) theme, it was not possible to identify papers that aim to verify the impacts of LSS methodology over the organization with a holistic and sustainable point of view. Within this scenario, the present study seeks to fill the verified gap. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Lean thinking emerged initially with the development of the Toyota Production System, which Taiichi Ohno and associates structured to help Toyota company survival in a scenario of capital and resources constraints during the post-war recovery (Kurdve et al., 2014). A team of engineers of Motorola, led by Bill Smith in the mid-80s, developed the Six Sigma methodology with the goal to improve the performance of the production process, but the methodology was widely disseminated by GE CEO Jack Welch (Shah et al., 2008). Many authors have sought to integrate these two methodologies in the last few years in order to compose a single implementation model denominated by Sheridan (2000) as Lean Six Sigma (LSS). Pepper and Spedding (2010) define the LSS as a structured and systematic approach for results improvement that perform statis- tical analyzes in order to reduce the incidence of defects in the final product at 3.4 defects per million and eliminate waste around all the production process. Originally developed in order to increase productivity on the shop floor, the LSS methodology stands as an effective track for improving organizational performance, mainly due to its feature to seek the improvement of processes with the purpose of achieving superior results in cost, productivity and quality (Salah et al., 2010). The LSS methodology continues to evolve in terms of the application of LSS methodology in other areas of an organization (Antony et al., 2012; Fischman, 2010; Hsieh et al., 2012), beyond the production environment itself, the expansion of the tools used (Kornfeld and Kara, 2013; Lertwattanapongchai and William Swierczek, 2014; Meza and Jeong, 2013) and the development of multiple deployment models (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005; Campos, 2013; Salah et al., 2010). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: jgaldinofreitas@gmail.com (J.G. de Freitas). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.04.054 0959-6526/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 156 (2017) 262e275